Exploring Educating Rita

All,

http://www.litnotes.co.uk/educatin.htm

Go here.  It is an excellent page.  It has been created for AS level English students and so it is probably good enough for us!

Read through the content.  Pick one of the 'starting points' and write a response to it.  Post it.  Simples!

Educating Rita - Understanding the Details

Willy Russell could have chosen any books and authors to reference in the play.  Why did he choose the ones that he did?  In order to figure out the answer to this question we need to know a little more about some of the authors and their works that are referenced by Frank and Rita.

Between you find out a little about...

T. S. Eliot and his poem 'J. Arthur Profrock'
E. M. Forster and the novel 'Howard's End'
The life and work of Roger McGough
W. B. Yeats and the poem 'The Wild Swans at Coole'
Rita Mae Brown and her novel 'Rubyfruit Jungle'
Henrik Ibsen and his play 'Peer Gynt'
Anton Checkhov and his play 'The Seagull'
Oscar Wilde and his play 'The Importance of Being Earnest'
Bram Stoker and his novel 'Dracula'
D. H. Lawrence and his novels 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' and 'Sons and Lovers'
William Blake and his collection of poems 'Songs of Innocence and Experience'
Mary Shelley and her novel 'Frankenstein'

Get on it...

Willy Russell

http://www.willyrussell.com/

You are going to create a resource about the author Willy Russell.

Collect biographical details about the author's life and works.

The above link is a good starting point but you can and should go beyond it.

Everyone posts two details about the author.  One about his life and one about his work.

There is not to be any repetition.
There is not to be any repetition.

This means you have to check all previous posts to make sure your information is 'new'.

Message ends

New Task 2

In Cluster One there are four poems that could be considered to be about places and having a sense of place.

These poems are:

Island Man
Blessing

Night of the Scorpion 
What Were They Like?

http://www.teachit.co.uk/armoore/anthology/differentcultures.htm#vultures

Using this link comment on how the two poems Night of the Scorpion and What Were They Like? are both similar to and different from the poem Island Man in the ways in which they consider the idea of people having a sense of place.

If it helps consider the phrase 'a sense of place' to mean having a feeling of belonging somehere.

New Task

So...there are eight poems in cluster 1.

It has been decided that the absolute minimum biographical detail you are going to know about these poets is their nationality.

Task


Create thirty postings (one each) of all the poem titles, poets and their nationalities without repeating the form, appearance and structure of any of the previous posts.

or

Post your findings here. Each posting should look different from all the previous ones.

Everyone should type the text out and spend a few minutes playing with the appearance of the text.

At the very least this will mean you will spend some time with the required knowledge.

Your knowledge of this knowledge will be tested on Thursday.

Writing to Argue...Advice

A common question in relation to writing to argue is, "Sir, can we make stuff up?"  The answer is a difficult one.  Here is some expert advice from an English website...

The evidence needs to be convincing but, in an exam situation at least, it does not have to be factual, i.e. you can 'make it up'; you are allowed to make up such things as expert opinions and statistical evidence to support your argument.

Importantly, whatever evidence you do use, it must be well considered and reasonable.

Task

The American government has been hiding the fact that we are regularly visited by aliens for decades.  Not only do the Americans have an alien spacecraft this is where they took the technology for the internet from.  Alien species are not only in communication with us but they are living among us.

a) Make up a plausible expert opinion to back this up.  Provide a quotation and details of who it is from.

b)  Make up some believeable statistical evidence to support this claim.  Make a note of where the data has come from.

Remember...well considered and reasonable!

Limbo

If you follow the link below you will find some rather good information on the poem 'Limbo'.

http://www.teachit.co.uk/armoore/anthology/differentcultures.htm#limbo

Read it carefully.

Make some bullet point notes on it for revision puposes.

Task

Given what you have read, which of the other poems in cluster one most closely relate to the poem 'Limbo'?

You could make connections between the poems thematically or stylistically...or both!

Try to come up with original ideas but later postings may agree or disagree with previous ones providing that they state their reasons.

Wouldn't it be great if you just knew everything?

Well no-one can..

The good news is that there are strategies for giving the impression you know everything.  This is of particular interest to you as you are coming to a critical period of your life during which you will be tested on nearly everything.

A good way of persuading people that you know a lot is to know details; obscure aspects of a subject.  You will find that if you know things that others do not or that few people do then people will presume you know all the obvious stuff.

Make sense?

Good!

Let's say that you will be required to give the impression that you know all the rules of grammar...on an English exam in a few weeks for example.  A good way of showing some flair would be to include a correct use of the following rule...

Before a word beginning with a silent h you would use the word 'an' and not 'a'.

For example:  I'll be there in an hour

The important thing to remember is that the h should be silent.  A common mistake is to get carried away and start going to 'an horrific incident at an hospital'...which sounds an horrible.

I'd suggest you should actively try and show this skill on your exam.

Common words that should be preceded by 'an'

heiress

heir

hour

honest

honour

Post a few sentences practing this rule.

Prizes available for adding apropriate words to the list.

This week the topic is...

...How to use the ellipsis
The ellipsis (...), sometimes called the suspension or omission marks, has three uses:

• to show that some material has been omitted from a direct quotation [One of Churchill's most famous speeches declaimed: "We shall shall fight them on the beaches ... We shall never surrender".]
• to indicate suspense [The winner is ...]
• to show that a sentence has been left unfinished because it has simply trailed off [Watch this space ...]

Each of you should compose three sentences using an ellipsis in each of the three ways above.

Simples!

Parentheses

Brackets, or parentheses, are often misused by students at GCSE.  

This is not going to be you.

Using the link below to discover their true usage post two sentences using brackets correctly.
You should try to use both methods that the website outlines.

http://correctpunctuation.explicatus.info/punctuation-brackets.htm

Congratulations to the class for so brilliantly completing the last task.  I hope you can all see the purpose and benefit in these posts and that you all continue to contribute.

The semi-colon

Use a semi-colon

to link two separate sentences that are closely related

The children came home today; they had been away for a week.
I only ate one cake for tea; I wish I'd eaten two. 

http://www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/department/docs/punctuation/node17.html

http://correctpunctuation.explicatus.info/punctuation-colon.htm

http://www.gcse.com/english/semicolon_use.htm

Each member of 11 AA must post two sentences on this blog that show that they can use a semi-colon correctly.

A random sample of them will be put into a search engine to see if you nicked them off a site.

Feel free to comment on each other's work...nicely.